Why am I raving on about this guy? Because he created his own award, and then blessed me with it! It is quite an impressive award, I must say.

He asks us to boast about ourselves, because we’re friggin awesome. This is a really hard task for me, as I live in fear of mockery about my work, both my photography and my writing. I wake up each day thinking that someone is going to jump on here and say ‘What were you thinking? You can’t write! Your photography’s crap! Get back behind the coffee machine where you belong!’

But I digress. I think the fact that I am finally on here, sharing both my writing and my photography with the world, shows that my confidence is getting better and I am starting to believe that while I may not yet be ‘friggin awesome’, I am at the very least ‘frig-awe’. The ‘gin-some’ will come one day.

So, who out there in the blogosphere do I think is pretty friggin awesome? Well, everyone that I follow, for a start. But I’m going to throw this out to a few of my faves, and I’m sure it will make it’s way around to the rest of you soon.

Again, I would nominate hundreds more of you if time and patience allowed, but unfortunately those two things are sorely lacking in my life at the moment. There is another reason that I chose these six, and that is because they have all been incredibly supportive of my blogs, both this one and The Paperbook Blog. That’s not to say that there aren’t many more of you that have been equally as supportive, and believe me when I say I appreciate every single person who reads, likes or comments on anything I post.

After witnessing a particularly harsh and unnecessary attack on someone’s blog today, I just want to put some positivity and encouragement out into the WordPress atmosphere. What I love most about this place is just how supportive everyone is of each other, re-blogging, sharing and promoting blog’s we love. It is one of the most encouraging things that can be done for anyone who is trying to achieve anything with their blog, be it forging a new career or simply having a place to vent.

Sahm asked us as part of this award to state one thing that makes us happy, and for me today it’s you, my fellow bloggers. So at the risk of sounding overly sentimental: keep encouraging one another, keep reading other’s work, share and promote what you love and if you see something you don’t like, just scroll past it. It’s not hard to do.

I am a bit delayed with this post, thanks to a hectically busy week. Thank god it’s Saturday, lets pop the bubbly. This is my secondary blog, so it is really hard to get followers, because anyone I follow, like or comment on gets linked back to my primary blog, The Paperbook Blog. So to the few followers I have managed to accumulate on here, you are more precious than gold to me.

And a huge THANKYOU to Jo over at Jo of all trades for nominating me for my first award for this blog, The Liebster Award. Jo’s blog is an awesome collection of her writing, well worth a visit and a read!

The Liebster Award is for bloggers who have less than 200 followers, in order to generate interest and promote their blog.

So to the award rules:

1. LIST 11 RANDOM FACTS ABOUT YOU.
2. ANSWER THE QUESTIONS THAT WERE ASKED OF YOU (BY THE BLOGGER THAT NOMINATED YOU).
3. NOMINATE 11 OTHER BLOGS FOR THE LIEBSTER BLOG AWARD AND LINK TO THEIR BLOGS.
4. NOTIFY THE BLOGGERS OF THEIR AWARD.
5. ASK THE AWARD WINNERS 11 QUESTIONS TO ANSWER ONCE THEY ACCEPT THE AWARD

I’m going to challenge myself to follow these rules related to this blog only, as in, they will be all about my photography. Here goes…

11 Random Facts:

I only really got into photography when I travelled to Asia for the first time, in 2008.

During this trip I took hundreds of photos, but as this was back when memory cards held only about 300 photos each, I had to burn them to a disk and wipe them off my camera each time it became full.

I promptly lost those disks upon returning to Australia, and in the midst of my constant moving around, changing computers etc. I only have about 100 photo’s left of this magical trip, a fact which saddens me incredibly every time I think about it.

My boyfriend constantly gets pissed off with me because I am always lagging behind him, taking hundreds of pictures of the same sunset.

My sister is the head journalist at the local paper, and she uses my photos of events when their photo-journalist has taken shit ones. She has yet to pay me…

I am obsessed with making photo books for people as gifts, it is the most amazing way to display photographs and is a lot more interesting to look at than an album.

I only began editing my photos just before I started this blog, so every photo I post is a learning curve.

I have started up a shop on Esty with the intention of selling some of my photo’s, mounted on photo blocks as wall hangings, but I have been too busy to get it up and running so the shop is empty.

The first camera I owned was a film camera that you wound forward between each shot. It could take 12 photos on one film.

I have had to delete my photo’s off my iPhone six times because the memory was full. I have had the phone for less than a month.

I just rolled from the office into the kitchen on my computer chair, because I didn’t want to wake up my cat who is sleeping on my lap. I may have become a crazy cat lady.

Questions posted by Jo:

1) When and why did you start blogging?

I started this blog because I got so inspired by all the great photo-blogs out there. Also, I hardly ever show my photos to anyone (because I think that I’ll bore them), so I thought it would be a good way to get some feedback.

2) What is the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

Probably a tie between sea urchin, chicken livers and bone marrow.

3) If you were to count up all the lines on your fingers and your toes, what would you be thinking about?

How wrinkly my hands and feet are getting. I was terrified of having wrinkly hands when I was younger. Ok, I’m still terrified. I’m only 26 dammit, how dare wrinkles appear!

4) If you could have a pet anything, what would it be and what would you name it?

I would like to have a pet zebra, or maybe a small heard of pet zebra’s. They were my favourite animal from South Africa, despite the fact that everyone else liked the lions and tigers and rhino’s and hippo’s and giraffe’s and basically anything else that didn’t look like a painted horse. I don’t know what I’d name them, I would have to meet them first.

5) What is the most amazing thing you have ever done and how did you get the opportunity to do it?

A tie again, between a heli-tour over the Great Barrier Reef, sky-diving over Lake Taupo and a Tiger-moth flight over Lake Wanaka. My boyfriend organised the Tiger-moth flight for our two year anniversary, and we both wanted to sky-dive Lake Taupo. The heli-tour I got for free as a perk of my old job (what-up).

6) You have a nuclear device. How did you get it and what are you going to do with it?

I probably seduced someone in the American government to get my hands on it. In a perfect world I would use it to threaten the U.S. government to disarm, causing a chain effect of nuclear disarmament throughout the world. In reality it would probably start a nuclear war which would wipe us out altogether.

7) Math has been said to be the universal language. How do you cope with this?

Not well. Not well at all.

8) What is your quest?

To do some good in the world. To live somewhat sustainably. To quote John Steinbeck, We should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

9) What is your favorite color? Why?

I would have to say red. I have no idea why it’s my favourite colour, I just remember saying it was as a young girl.

10) Where would you go to survive an outbreak of a highly contagious, nearly always fatal disease?

Deep into the country in South West Australia. I have always thought it would be nice to live somewhere completely isolated and independent from society, reliant only on yourselves. There is so much space out there in Australia that I’m sure I could avoid a contagious disease quite easily.

11) If the moon could sustain life, how do you think Mars would feel?

Pissed off that the noise level in the neighbourhood would have risen.

Ok, I know it’s not 11. But I wanted to pass this on to fellow photo bloggers, or blogs that predominantly feature photography. Also, I have passed on 11 nominations on my other blog, so I’m all nominated out! But these five blogs all feature great photography, so pop over and check them out.